John Kessel 2009 Interview
John Kessel is nominated for his novelette “Pride and Prometheus.”
Would you like to talk about the inspiration behind Pride and Prometheus?
I got the initial idea at the critique table at the Sycamore Hill Writers’ Conference in 2005. We were discussing Benjamin Rosenbaum’s story (later published as , a Jane Austen pastiche, when it occurred to me that Austen and Mary Shelley were contemporaries, and that both of them were, at least in part, about finding a “mate.” I jotted it down in my notebook and though about the story a great deal over the next months. I re-read Frankenstein and Pride and Prejudice. When I did so I noticed that, at one point in Frankenstein, Victor and his friend Henry Clerval visit the town of Matlock, which is mentioned in Austen as being near Mr. Darcy’s estate of Permberly. When I discovered that, it seemed like a signpost telling me I had to write this story.
In the writing of Pride and Prometheus, did you have a particular favorite character? Who was this character and why was she/he your favorite?
I think my favorite character is Kitty, the heroine Mary Bennet’s sister. When I started she was merely the flirty sister of the serious Mary (with whom my sympathies primarily lay). But as I wrote my way into the story Kitty became more and more important, both to the plot (what happens to her leads to its resolution) and to its themes. I felt for her predicament, as an unmarried woman in her late twenties, without particular resources of character and judgment, in Regency England. She desperately desires to marry, but her prospects are fading. She’s become more than the silly sidekick to Lydia she was in Pride and Prejudice, but there seems to be no role for her in this world than “old maid,” which is to her a complete failure. Mary of course faces the same fate, maybe even more, but she has developed some greater understanding of herself and the world. Kitty affected me emotionally in a way that the typical “silly woman” would not normally.
Are there particular themes that attract you or which you feel moved to write about? What are you passionate about?
I am passionate about the choices people make, and how they affect their fates. I’m puzzled by human personality. Lately it’s come out in my work in a concern about male-female relationships. I suppose that’s been a concern of writers since writing began. But it’s certainly not exhausted.
You could say I’m obsessed with moral issues, but I hope it’s not in a moralistic way. I don’t mean sexual morality, I mean the ways in which people treat and mistreat each other, the social structures that make it easier for them to ct well or poorly, and how those structures can be changed for the better or worse.
Among the stories you’ve written is there one that you are proudest of?
I’m a little reluctant to pick favorites. Sometimes you like one story more than another for reasons that are not objective assessments of how they came out. But if I were to say which ones give me the best feeling long after having written them, I’d list a few: “Invaders,” “Stories for Men,” “The Franchise,” “The Baum Plan for Financial Independence,” “Buddha Nostril Bird,” and this one, “Pride and Prometheus.”
If I had to stake my reputation on a single story, I suppose it would be “Invaders.”
When you start a new project, do you know whether that project will be a short story, novella or novel? How do you know and how do you make the choice?
I generally know more or less how long it’s going to be by the time I begin putting words down. It just feels like a 7,000-word story, or a 17,000-word story, or a novel. I have seldom started a story and had it turn out to be much longer or shorter than I intended. It’s not really so much a rational choice as a feeling for what this story is about, the effect I want it to have on the reader. The idea of taking a short story idea and expanding it to a novel feels alien to me.
Has winning various awards changed the way you look at your position as a writer or the way in which you approach writing?
Winning awards is certainly wonderful, and makes me feel good. I have desired to win them, but I can’t say I have ever set out to win one--though I did have the feeling when writing “Stories for Men” that it might attract the attention of the Tiptree Award jury.
When I won the Nebula for my novella “Another Orphan” early in my career--I was 32 years old--it was a major surprise. It rather derailed me for a while. I didn’t know what it meant for me or my work. Was I an “award-winning writer”? What did that mean for my next story?
But that was so long ago. Now I have a sense of who I am as a writer, I think, and I write what I’m interested in, and just hope other people will find it interesting too. I’d love for “Pride and Prometheus” to win the Nebula, but it won’t be an iota better or worse as a story if it does or doesn’t.
You continue to teach as well as write. How do these two disciplines influence and inform each other?
As a teacher I’m always thinking about how stories work, and trying to convey that to my students. That often makes me think about what I’m trying to do. For instance, when I was starting “Pride and Prometheus,” I actually used it in class as an excersise in plotting--I wrote down a couple ideas I had for scenes on the blackboard, and we talked about how those might grow into a story, and who the characters were and what they wanted. I always talk about how plot and character are flip sides of each other, and this was a good way to make the point.
I don’t get as much writing done as I might otherwise because I am teaching. I do get to work with some wonderful young writers, and help them to make their own stories better. I’m very proud of the work they have created.
What’s the best piece of advice you ever got from another writer?
James Gunn, my teacher at the University of Kansas , said to me that stories aren’t written, they’re rewritten. At the time I disliked rewiting, but now it is my favorite part of the process.
I don’t know if I ever heard it in so many words from one person, but over my career and interactions with numerous writers, I’ve also learned that you should write what you like and let the market figure it out later.
What does your typical writing day look like?
Many days during the school year are not writing days. When I get time to write , I get up in the morning, have breakfast, maybe walk the dog, read my email, and take up where I left off on the story last. I’ll start by rewriting what I wrote the last time, and keep going forward. I have starts and stops, sometimes have to ponder issues as to what happens next. In the summer when I have my days more to myself, I’ll work until one pm or so, then break for lunch. I’ll come back and do some idle work--correspondence, etc--or read, or go out and get some exercise, or do the marketing for the family.
In the summer I often cook supper. When Sue and Emma get home, we have supper, and in the evening often watch some tv or a movie on DVD.
What’s your next project? Would you like to tell us about that?
Right now I’m sort of between things. I just finished editing an anthology, THE SECRET HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION, with James Patrick Kelly, due out from Tachyon Books in Fall 2009. I have a desire to get back to a novel I stalled on a few years back, set in the lunar background of “Stories for Men” and the others of the “Lunar Quartet.” We’ll see if that works out.
John Kessel co-directs the creative writing program at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. A winner of the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the Locus Poll, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, his books include Good News from Outer Space, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and The Pure Product. His story collection, Meeting in Infinity, was named a notable book of 1992 by the New York Times Book Review. Writer Kim Stanley Robinson has called Corrupting Dr. Nice “the best time travel novel ever written.” Most recently, with James Patrick Kelly he edited the anthologies Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology and Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology. He lives with his wife and daughter in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz was born in the South of the Philippines, grew up in the mountains of the North (Ifugao), and moved to The Netherlands after her marriage. When she went to college, her mother insisted that she take up music, a thing for which she is grateful as it now supports her passion for the written word. She writes columns for the Philippine-Dutch publication (Munting Nayon), reviews for The Fix , and co-edits the online mainstream publication, Haruah: Breath of Inspiration. Her fiction has recently appeared in Weird Tales Magazine, Fantasy Magazine and Philippine Speculative Fiction volume four.
